Per request of a friend, this is the prologue to the first draft of my current writing project.

The moment John Barker Haden died, every wolf on the face of the Earth lifted its muzzle toward the heavens and howled.

It's said that when each of the Wright brothers died, every bird in the world stopped singing and observed a moment of silence. It's said that when Jacques Cousteau died, every whale in the world simultaneously breached the ocean surfaces and belly-flopped back to their watery homes. It's also said that when Eva Gabor died, every mink in the world laughed its ass off. Whether there is any truth to these claims is speculative.

But the wolves howled.

They howled from the heights of sugar-frosted mountains in Alaska and from beneath the dark canopy of the Belarussian Bialowieza Forest. They howled from within their dens in the Sawtooth Mountains, from the sun-sizzled Arizona desert, and from the steppes of Russian Siberia. No matter where they were, no matter what they were doing, they all stopped and howled.

Not many people noticed, however. Most wolves make their homes far from humans, so their plaintive cries went largely unheard. The howls of those who did live in close proximity to civilization were simply ignored, their human neighbors too busy to take notice.

Only a few, those whose lives were closely intertwined with the wolves', noticed anything peculiar. A zookeeper in New Zealand stopped in the middle of making his feeding rounds and scratched his head when the wolves simultaneously paused suddenly in mid-meal to howl in unison. A group of Inuit hunters tracking game along a deer path were startled by the holy chorus echoing from the surrounding hills. Game wardens and park rangers hiking through the lands they tended hesitated briefly in their tracks when they heard the sad cries sounding through the woods around them. None would attach any significance to the odd phenomenon, however, and they each returned to their tasks.

Many theories exist as to the reason wolves howl. Folklore holds that wolves howl at the full moon. Some of these full-moon folk tales hold that the moon exerts some supernatural force upon wolves. Others believe that wolves are so attracted by the moon's beauty that they howl in defeat because they cannot fly. Still others hold that wolves howl at the moon in a futile, dogged attempt to make it move.

Scientists offer more reasonable theories. It is widely held among the scientific community that the wolves' howl is not tied to the moon's appearance at all, but rather that it is a form of communication, a means to hold the pack together during times when seasonal scarcity causes them to roam far from one another in search of food. Others hold that howling may be one of the many idiosyncratic social behaviors by which wolves attain rank within their packs.

None of these hypotheses, whether of science or superstition, of fact or fiction, is accurate, however.

The truth lies in the fact that there exists a common thread running throughout the rough fabric from which all living things are cut, a connection fed by the collective unconscious which joins all creatures, regardless of genus or species. When a single creature is in distress, all others feel it, though the degree to which they do varies widely. Some feel a moment of discomfort - a passing sense of dizziness or disorientation which they may attribute to a lack of sleep or having eaten something disagreeable - while others are much more profoundly affected, suffering nightmares or bouts of insomnia, falling into depression or illness, or, at its extreme, even dying.

When one creature suffers, all others experience a momentary flex and twist of some unmapped chromosomal strand deep in the primitive portions of their genetic makeup. In most cases, once stretched, it never quite returns completely to its original shape.

It is this connection of commonality which explains how a mother can instantly sense that her child hundreds of miles away has died suddenly. It is this connection of morphic knowledge which explains how prehistoric societies separated by vast expanses of ocean and time all suddenly and simultaneously reached significant milestones in their cultural evolution - harnessing fire, developing language, decorating their cave walls with paintings. It is this connection which explains the befuddling discovery by English settlers and Australian aboriginal tribes, when they first encountered one another, that each of their languages had the same word for "dog."

It is this same connection which explains why all the wolves howled when John Barker Haden died. Though his death may have sent ripples throughout the entire pond of creation, most creatures were too far from the epicenter of the splash to be affected by it.

To the wolves, however, it was stark and painful.

Forget all the fables claiming that wolves howl at the moon. Forget the scientific journals suggesting that wolves howl in order to keep in touch with one another. Forget all that mankind has claimed to know of the way of the wolves, for that matter. None of it is even remotely accurate.

The wolves felt John Barker Haden's death so sharply because he was born of the wolf spirit. They cried out because they knew the instant he died that they had lost one of their own. They cried out for the real reason wolves howl.

It's how they pray.